May 2007 — News

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Long Odds, Short Fuses

by Dave Nagel

Following last month's unprecedented massacre at Virginia Tech, security has, once again, temporarily moved to the top of the policy agenda in schools. As educators, parents, school staff, and concerned human beings in general, we all want to provide the absolute safest environment possible for the children in our care. Incidents of violence on college and school campuses remind us of our vulnerabilities. Couple this feeling of vulnerability with major media coverage, and we wind up with pressures both internal and external pushing administrators into immediate action.

At times incidents of violence can lead to sound policy decisions. They can get administrators thinking about potential dangers and effective methods of deterring or responding to a broad range of crises. At other times, violent incidents are followed by reactionary thinking, leading some down twisted paths of logic to react in knee-jerk fashion based on non-sequiturs and purely emotional, gut-level fears (a phenomenon popularly known as "common sense").

The Logical Leap
None of this is new. Listening to heavy metal leads to Satan worship. Playing Dungeons & Dragons leads to suicide. Incidents receiving widespread media attention over the years have generated such leaps in logic in the past. It seems ridiculous now, but these "issues" made the rounds all the way to Congress. And similar topics (violence in the media, violence in video games, etc.) continue to creep into the public discourse.

So it shouldn't be too surprising that, following Virginia Tech, more leaps of logic like this would be made. The Virginia Tech mass murderer wrote works containing violent imagery and concepts. Ergo someone else who composes an essay containing violent imagery is a mass murderer waiting to go on a rampage. Pass that on to your logic instructors and see whether they can construct a valid syllogism out of it. I can't.

Yet this is the logic that led to the arrest of Allen Lee, the Cary-Grove (IL) High School senior who wrote an essay that disturbed some people. The essay contained imagery that portrayed violence. (Some called it a "violent essay," though I've never witnessed an essay committing any act of violence.) The essay also suggested that one of Cary-Grove's teachers might one day drive a student to shoot (Lee 2007).

It was enough to raise the hackles of hysteria amongst school and district administrators and the state's attorney's office to have the young adult charged in the matter and to remove him from the general student population. As of this writing, May 6, 2007, Lee looks to have all charges against him dropped and appears to be heading back into the general student population at Cary-Grove (Naqvi 2007). This week should see significant developments in the case.

Not that I'm without sympathy for the school and district. With Virginia Tech fresh in everybody's minds, administrators couldn't really ignore the situation and expect to keep their jobs. But to have Lee arrested? That is not a practical or reasonable solution. Not only was it a solution based on unfounded fears, but it was one that assumed Lee was somehow unique in expressing macabre thoughts about death or in considering authority detrimental to the psychological well being of students.